…there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work, and besides he was a Howler himself.
-Kipling
There was always a steady north wind on our trip. I wouldn’t say it was a howler, it just blew a lot of sand along the ground and if you were mounted up you could stay out of it. Tea breaks were another story because it always got into our glasses. Bilal had a way of putting his other hand over the top like a lid between sips. Sitting with one’s back to the wind made things worse because the sand then would eddy on your leeward side and get into everything you were trying to keep clear.
Once when the wind was strong I asked Masood abu Dood where we were heading, pointing straight ahead into it. He said, UmDuhayr. I asked when we would get there, thinking it was a village or a well flat maybe with a windbreak. He just smiled. I asked KhairAallah, When will we arrive in UmDuhayr? He also smiled.
We never passed UmDuhayr and I forgot all about it until I was home months later and reread my diary. UmDuhayr, I had written. I tried to find the word in the dictionary but it is not easy because there are at least three different near-homophone consonants that might give the spoken “d” sound in Sudanese Arabic, and two different letters that might give an ”h” sound.
The word Duhayr is in the diminutive form. Its base word is Dahr. Dahr in the dictionary spelled with the only “d” consonant beginning the triliteral root d-h-r means Eternity. I wondered if Masood that day had been pointing into the wind and telling me, We are going to the Mother of Little Eternity, wherever he thought that was, wherever he thought I wanted to go.